Music goers, sun seekers, brave high, humid temps

Hundreds of teenagers and 20-somethings queued up along Ashland Avenue before the gates opened at the Pitchfork Music Festival, enduring a relentless midday sun in exchange for the best vantage points around the festival stages.

Though Pitchfork's crowds skew young and fashion-forward, comfort took precedent over style. Mostly.

“I saw someone in a sweatshirt yesterday,” said Jeff Mather of Cleveland, who brought a three-liter bottle of water to the gate on Sunday, the third day of the festival. “I was really confused.”

Across Chicago, residents turned to fluids, fans and air conditioners to cope with extreme heat that is expected to last through the week. The heat index hit 103 on the lakefront Sunday, and similar figures are expected until at least Friday, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters called for high temperatures in the upper 90s for most of the week, intensified by soupy humidity.

The roughly 18,000 music fans who packed into a sun-baked Union Park for the last day of the annual festival had access to cooling buses. Organizers on Sunday planned to pass out even more free bottles of water than they had the day before – 13,000.

The heat inspired entrepreneurs who lugged coolers from their nearby homes to hawk bottled water to concertgoers. As shirtless teenage boys shouted “ice cold water” from the traffic islands on Ashland, Jerome Tate, 39, hunched under the train tracks above Lake Street, unloading glistening 50-pound blocks of ice in cardboard boxes to replenish the coolers of bottles.

Repeating what seemed to be the whole city’s mantra for the day, he said: “As long as you stay hydrated, you’ll be OK.”

As if to illustrate the point, dozens of sweat-sopped bicyclists pulled up to Chicago Police Department headquarters Sunday afternoon near the end of the seventh annual Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.) Cycle Across Illinois. The multijurisdictional crew of police officers and family members of fallen police were joined at the end of their ride of more than 300 miles by Chicago officers and supporters willing to undertake a more leisurely trip to a lakefront police memorial.

Asked if the cause of honoring fallen officers was worth the physical punishment of a four-day ride, a sweat-drenched Eamon Walsh answered without hesitation, “Hell, yes.”

“I’ll do this until my legs physically can’t pedal,” said Walsh, a juvenile detention aide in Orland Park.

A few blocks away, 30-year-old Ron Hamilton was attending to the needs of one person – his one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Hamilton drove to a tire shop on 43rd Avenue to inflate a newly purchased kiddie pool, which he stuffed awkwardly into his silver coupe. He has a window air conditioning unit in his Bronzeville home, but it won’t stand up to the heat expected this week, he said.

Hamilton and the rest of Chicago are directly in the middle of the prime time for dangerous heat and humidity.

About 37 percent of the nearly 2,000 days in which temperatures reached 90 degrees in Chicago from 1928 through last year were in July, more than any other month, according to data gathered at Midway Airport and analyzed by WGN-TV meteorologists.

Twelve percent of those days fell between July 15 and July 23, WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling said.

While the Chicago area is accustomed to hot mid-summer stretches, the heat wave by which all other hot spells are measured remains the deadly July 1995 stretch that killed more than 700 area residents.

Forecasters said temperatures this week are unlikely to match those conditions – and no deaths were reported in the current heat wave as of Sunday – but the 1995 heat wave drove home lessons that continue to guide the response to extreme heat.

Paul W. Dailey, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s Chicago office during the heat wave, was part of a commission created to study that hot spell. Members analyzed years' worth of records from the Cook County medical examiner's office and found that most days on which at least 100 people died – well above the city's usual daily summer average – were not only extremely hot but also shared certain characteristics, such as abnormally high heat indexes and overnight temperatures.

“We used to treat (heat) as just something that was inconvenient for people (or) uncomfortable,” said Dailey, a part-time meteorologist with WGN-TV.

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